Remixing Android

One of the long-term advantages of Android over any other mobile platform is that it is open source. What that means for you is that you can rehash it into a new product, a new ROM. That new operating system may not even look like the Android that was intended for mobile phones.

The problem with Android customization is that at this point it is mostly black magic – almost no documentation exists and your only way of figuring things out is reading the source code, many gigabytes of it.

In this talk we’ll explore how to go about customizing Android, and what some of the philosophy behind the organization of the code and the build system is. You will learn at high level how to go about customizing Android by adding custom apps, libraries, daemons, binaries, and other code and resources that go into the operating system. You will also learn about the startup process for a typical Android device and a bit about its security model as it relates to Linux.

Marko Gargenta

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Marko Gargenta founded Marakana in 2001 to help underprivileged youth, minorities, and inner-city kids learn web technologies and get ahead in life. So Marakana emerged with goal of helping people get better at what they do professionally, focused on open source software training.

Marko is author of Learning Android book published by O’Reilly Media. This book is based on Android Bootcamp and incorporates best learning practices for new developers to start creating applications for this exciting open source mobile platform.

Marko is also co-author of “PHP and MySQL By Example”, a collection of PHP examples. The book was published by Prentice Hall in 2006, and has been translated to Spanish and Polish.

Marko Gargenta obtained his Bachelor of Mathematics Degree from University of Waterloo (Canada’s MIT) and has been developing in Java since 1996. He lives in San Francisco, California.